When the Age of Fire first began, the world was ruled by disparity and war. The newly-crowned Lords, freshly emerged from the First Flame, would not tolerate the dragons – but it would not be as easy as simply not tolerating. Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight, fought at the front lines, casting bolts of lightning at the dragons; his firstborn son, Gwyndalion, was ever at his side, his four Knights never far behind.

In the midst of battle, as his father rained lightning upon the dragons, Gwyndalion pressed forward, looking to break through a gap in the line of enemies; Ornstein, clad in golden armour and a lion's face helm, followed.

'Why do you leave your father's side?' Ornstein called to Gwyndalion, sprinting after him through grey stone fields littered with the bodies of dead Silver Knights and heavy broken scales. 'Your place is with him.'

'My place is in battle,' Gwyndalion retorted, stopping as they emerged into a space of unbroken earth, yet unsullied by war.

'You cannot win a battle alone, Firstborn,' said Ornstein, placing a golden gauntlet on Gwyndalion's arm. 'Your father has been fighting this war for longer than you have been walking the world.'

Gwyndalion scowled. He knew that Ornstein disliked his recklessness, and he knew that scowling at him would provoke him: Ornstein would much prefer not to be able to see his expressions, he knew, but Gwyndalion had always refused to wear a helmet, taking the armour he best liked the look of over the most practical.

'You are strong,' Ornstein told him.

'I am,' Gwyndalion replied.

'But a dragon is more than strong.'

'If it is anything other than strong, I have no time for it.'

Ornstein paused, and Gwyndalion knew that his face under the golden lion was disapproving. He had never seen Ornstein's face.

'You must make time for it,' said Ornstein, and Gwyndalion scowled at him again.

'I must do nothing,' he said.

Ornstein hefted his spear, and Gwyndalion thought he would try to impale him, but a loud roar and the heavy beat of stone-leathered wings behind him made the situation clear: a great dragon descended, its heavy talons cracking into the earth.

'You must make time for this,' Ornstein said, and Gwyndalion was almost sure he could hear a tone of mocking in his voice.

'Fine,' he said, and drew his longsword. The Firstborn carried many weapons, partly because he liked to challenge any man alive to best him with any of them, but mostly because he liked above all else to be able to kill something any way he wanted.

The dragon bounded forwards, three times the height of Gwyndalion, slicing at him with talons as long as his sword. Gwyndalion dashed in to meet it, rolling under its slashes. The safest place from which to fight a foe this large, he knew, was underneath, where it could not hit him – but he had reckoned without the dragon's tail, which whipped between its legs and struck him across the face. Gwyndalion stumbled back, feeling the blood leave his body, and a crazed smile began to creep across his face.

Sprinting between the dragon's back legs, he leapt and grabbed its tail where it met the creature's enormous body, and hacked at its less protected underside with his longsword until he felt it sever; then he took hold in both hands and pulled, ripping the tail from the dragon with a shower of stone scales. For good measure, tail still in hand, he bounded up its back towards its head, running along its spine to its neck, and pounded the dragon's head with the spiked end of its own tail.

Ornstein, meanwhile, darted about by the creature's feet, sticking crevice-like wounds in its legs with his spear at every opportunity; overcome by the damage to its legs and head, the dragon collapsed forwards – nearly crushing Ornstein underneath, but he nimbly floated aside – and Gwyndalion hopped down to the earth, staring into one of its eyes.

The eye was not like Gwyndalion had expected. It was… less hard, wetter, covered by a moist film rather than a granite block. He gazed at it for a moment, until it let out a heavy breath. Then he raised his hand, drawing power to cast a miracle from the talisman at his chest, and hurled a Great Lightning Spear through its eyeball.

The projectile disappeared completely into the beast's head, boring a fist-sized hole through its eye. It gave one last shiver and lay still.

'Easy,' said Gwyndalion.

'That doesn't look like easy,' Ornstein said, pointing at Gwyndalion's face.

'It's nothing. A fluke.' Gwyndalion touched a finger to the injury and daubed a little of his blood on the blade of his longsword, examining it for a moment before wiping it away and sheathing the weapon.

'You may not want to put that away just yet,' Ornstein observed, pointing with his spear into the sky.

Gwyndalion turned: three more dragons were rapidly screeching in their direction.

'I have other weapons,' he said.

'So do we,' Ornstein said, firing a bolt of lightning into the air with a loud, hissing crack.

'You're signalling for help?'

'There are three dragons headed right for us; I may be called Dragonslayer and you may be the Sun's Firstborn, but that still only makes two.'

Gwyndalion shrugged irritably. 'Then we would have had all the more glory for ourselves.'

'I would rather be alive than glorious, Firstborn.'

'Then you are hardly alive.'

The dragons came upon them, roaring and flailing their tails and wings as they crashed to the ground. Gwyndalion leapt to meet the first – a broad, muscled specimen, even for a dragon – with a Sunlight Blade miracle enveloping the falchion that flashed into his hands; he was vaguely aware of Ornstein dashing forwards in great bounds to strike at the legs of another. Then, as he sliced down with his blade, the dragon slithered underneath his leap, roaring at something behind him.

Gwyndalion landed hard, the third dragon scampering past him to join the first, and as Gwyndalion tuned he could see what had moved them: a dozen soldiers, perhaps a few more, in heavy armour. Ornstein's signal had called them here, slow-moving in their bulky gear, easy prey for the dragons.

Gwyndalion watched as the dragons pounded the men into the earth with their great toes, or snapped them up in their jaws. In the corner of his eye he saw Ornstein, distracted, sent flying by a swipe of his foe's talon. Exchanging his falchion for a great spear, he reached out to the souls of the dying soldiers.

Sparks played about Gwyndalion's body as he grew, taking strength from the fallen warriors to increase his own; within seconds, he was twice his usual height, and his power was made just as much greater. He flew into the dragon that had downed Ornstein, spearing it through the gut and tossing it aside easily, and then he fired an enormous bolt of lightning from the end of his weapon which blasted the other two dragons with all the force of the Lord of Sunlight himself.

Dashing forwards, bounding over the bodies of the soldiers whose strength he had claimed for himself, Gwyndalion thrust his spear through one of the dragons. It squealed, sounding like the scraping of falling rocks against a cliff side, and he impaled it over and over for long after it had stopped moving. When the rage left him, he became aware of Ornstein urgently trying to signal something to him, and then he was suddenly in the maw of the last dragon.

Struggling to free himself, Gwyndalion shot bolts of lightning into the roof of its mouth; it shook, but did not release him. He felt the borrowed power leave him and his body return to its usual size, and began to fall into its throat – but then: the sound of something heavy landing on the dragon's head, and it rocked with the impact. Then the blade of an enormous cleaver rocketed through the roof of the dragon's mouth, barely missing Gwyndalion as he lay on its spiked tongue. Its mouth lolled open and Gwyndalion launched himself free, turning in the air to fire one last bolt, bolstered by the power of the ring on his finger, straight down the dragon's throat. It shivered and collapsed, steam hissing from its mouth and fog billowing around it where it fell.

'Havel,' said Gwyndalion to the man standing on its head.

'Firstborn,' said Havel, clad in enormously bulky armour. 'Got yourself into a bit of a scrape?'

'I was dealing with it,' Gwyndalion said, half-irritably. He could not help but respect Havel's great strength, though, and Havel knew it.

'You don't have to be grateful,' Havel said, hopping down from the beast's snout, '- but I will take a little… let's call it a token of my victory over this great beast.'

Reaching into the dragon's mouth, Havel grabbed one of its teeth, almost the size of himself, and yanked it out with some effort. 'I can make a nice club out of this,' he said.

'I'm very happy for you,' Gwyndalion replied. 'As for you -' he said to Ornstein, who had approached, '- I thought you were the Dragonslayer, yet here I find myself slaying the dragon that would have slain you!'

'We are all dragon slayers, Firstborn,' Ornstein pointed out. 'There have been many, and most of them have been killed by dragons. I just happen to have been titled Dragonslayer by your father, which would have made my death all the easier for people to mock me for.'

Gwyndalion snorted.

'At any rate, I really must learn how to do that trick of yours where you grow larger,' Ornstein commented to Gwyndalion.

Then a great flame suddenly erupted from the centre of the forces under Gwyn, rushing out over the heads of their soldiers without so much as singing them.

'What is that…?' Gwyndalion wondered.

'Izalith is here,' Havel said.

The flame raced across the land, bolts of lightning continuing to fly in front of it and through it into the assembled dragons, and engulfed the dragons. Gwyndalion heard a sound like the scraping of granite blocks, and could only assume that the dragons were screaming. Then the ever-present fog grew dark, filled with strains of black and purplish miasma, and the dragons began to decay before their eyes.

'Nito is here?' said Ornstein.

'He may be dead, but he must have some desire to see us survive,' Gwyndalion mused.

'Or he just wants to see the dragons dead,' Havel observed.

The dragons screeched and writhed in the fire and the fog, and then a great white shape emerged in the space between the armies of the Lords and the forces of dragons. An albino dragon, clutching a crystal, raised its arms in triumph and watched its brethren fade to dust.

'What just happened?' Havel said in wonder as the white dragon slithered towards Gwyn, who bent his head as if in thanks.

'I think the dragons may have just become no more… at the hands of one of their own,' Gwyndalion murmured, watching his father sheathe his flaming sword and stride away from the battle, seemingly deep in conversation with the white dragon.

'The war is over?' said Ornstein.

'The war is over,' said Gwyndalion.